A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Communicative Patterns in Bilingual and Monolingual Mother-Child Dyads in the United States and Thailand

Parental speech has some influences on children’s language development. The way parents speak with their children is often reflected in the children’s speech patterns. Prior research suggests that monolingual mother-child communication differs as a function of linguistic and cultural background. The present study examined communicative patterns of bilingual and monolingual mother-child dyads in Thailand and the United States to determine whether there are differences in conversational style and content between bilinguals and monolinguals who are native to different countries and cultures. Participants included four bilingual mother-preschooler dyads from Thailand, four bilingual mother-preschooler dyads from the US, and 21 English monolingual dyads from the US. Each dyad completed three tasks in English: prompted reminiscing, book reading, and toy play. Interactions were video-recorded, transcribed using Codes for the Analysis of Human Language (CHAT), and coded for language measures. Data analysis utilized maternal and child mean frequency of each language measure. Results revealed that English monolingual mothers provided more descriptions, posed more questions, used more emotion words, and discussed their thoughts and feelings more than both groups of bilingual mothers. Similarly, English monolingual children shared their thoughts and feelings more than the two groups of bilingual children in each task, whereas the bilingual groups did not differ in their use of other linguistic measures. We conclude that culture and language status can change how monolinguals and bilinguals communicate, even when speaking the same language

Thai and American mothers socialize preschoolers’ emotional development differently

Abstract Cultures vary in beliefs about appropriate display of emotion. Children rely on adults to help them understand emotional experiences and display emotions in a culturally appropriate manner. The present study compared how emotion display differs between Thai and American mother–child interactions during preschool. Language samples from 21 Thai and 21 American mother–child dyads were elicited using prompted reminiscing, book reading, toy play, and child personal narrative tasks. Results revealed group differences in emotion talk and behavior. American dyads expressed more intense emotions during interactions compared to Thai dyads. American dyads also displayed more emotion behaviors than Thai dyads, whereas Thai dyads used more emotion words compared to American dyads. Additionally, there were gender differences in the expression of emotion, with boy dyads more emotionally intense than girl dyads in both groups. Boys displayed more negative emotion behaviors compared to girls during prompted reminiscing, whereas girls used more negative emotion words than boys during the personal narrative task. These findings demonstrate cultural and gender differences in socialization goals and practices regarding emotion display and underscore the influence of mothers’ scaffolding on children’s emotional development. This research reveals the variability in beliefs and values that underlie emotional development across sociocultural contexts

The role of syntactic cues in monolingual and bilingual two-year-olds' novel word disambiguation.

Although linguistic and nonlinguistic cues help young children infer meaning when presented with unfamiliar words, little is known about how syntactic information and early bilingual experience shape word learning. This study examined how monolingual and bilingual 24- to 30-month-olds' disambiguation of novel words during a mutual exclusivity task differs as a function of syntactic cues, age, and productive vocabulary. English monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals were presented with familiar and novel objects within a syntactic context (e.g., "Give me the blick!") or in isolation (e.g., "Blick!"). Results showed that monolinguals and bilinguals adhered to mutual exclusivity more often when provided with syntactic cues than when those cues were absent. Furthermore, bilinguals' mutually exclusive disambiguation of novel words increased with age, but only when syntactic cues were available. These results provide insight into factors that influence children's disambiguation of novel words. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed

Words and non-speech sounds access lexical and semantic knowledge differently

Using an eye-tracking paradigm, we examined the strength and speed of access to lexical knowledge (e.g., our representation of the word dog in our mental vocabulary) and semantic knowledge (e.g., our knowledge that a dog is associated with a leash) via both spoken words (e.g., “dog”) and characteristic sounds (e.g., a dog’s bark). Results show that both spoken words and characteristic sounds activate lexical and semantic knowledge, but with different patterns. Spoken words activate lexical knowledge faster than characteristic sounds do, but with the same strength. In contrast, characteristic sounds access semantic knowledge stronger than spoken words do, but with the same speed. These findings reveal similarities and differences in the activation of conceptual knowledge by verbal and non-verbal means and advance our understanding of how auditory input is cognitively processed